Improperly filled prescriptions represent a substantial risk of injury to customers at pharmacies. Filling prescriptions is a generally commoditized business where the objective is to maximize the number of prescriptions filled by each pharmacist per hour. It is inevitable that some prescriptions are filled with the incorrect drugs or medication.
To address this problem, systems for the validation of prescriptions have been proposed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,771,369 concerns a system and method for pharmacy validation and inspection. The disclosed system provides a combination of a bar code reader and a spectroscopy system. In operation, a container of pills is provided with a label containing prescription information for a specific patient. The label is read by the system's bar code reader. Contemporaneously, the spectral response of the pills contained within the container is also resolved. A data analysis system then compares the information from the bar code reader with the spectral response information to ensure that the chemical content of the pills within the container matches the prescription. Such systems provide a way of confirming the accuracy of a filled prescription. Specifically, they insure that the contents of the container match the container's label. In this way, errors in prescriptions could be reduced.